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It is hard to describe the loss of a sibling. I have accepted the passing of grandparents, then favorite teachers and past professors, even parents, and now some of my classmates are encountering their ends. And whenever it happens, I am hit by my strong memories. It all seems so impossible that they could be gone… and gone for good. With each such death, I face both the loss of a relationship, past or current, and with the fact that we are all mortal, including me, and including the “littermates” I grew up with.
So with the passing of my sister Laurie, the middle child among five, I am slapped with an awareness of death’s proximity.
Like most sibling relationships, it was intense and close while we were children, sharing the same parental guidance, following (and breaking) the same family rules, experiencing family events together, creating family jokes, exhilarating in, and sometimes suffering the family vacations. We also spent a lot of unsupervised time together. Our diverse individual interests ended up enriching all of us.
As we became adults, the sibling intensity diminished as we expanded our horizons and relationships. In our case, a bond remained that kept us in touch, continuing to attend family gatherings but also sharing our life experiences as we found partners, built careers, and raised our own families, occasionally leaning on each other when we encountered difficulties or setbacks. Our interests may have been diverse, but the childhood and family connections remained.
An early example of those unsupervised times was when my brother Eric and I built a treehouse. It took days, maybe weeks of unskilled labor to hammer a platform between oak tree stems and construct a rope ladder to reach it. When completed, we had our sanctuary, high up and overlooking the neighborhood. Our sisters were curious, and after their persistent complaints about our “no girls allowed” rule, we decided that we would allow them up, but only if they paid us a nickel. This worked out well, right up until they depleted their entire allowance savings, after which we denied access. Somehow, word of our treehouse fee arrangement reached our parents. It must have been difficult for my entrepreneurial father to explain why we needed to return our take.
Despite being scammed by her older brothers, Laurie was one smart cookie. But her strengths were not the same as her brothers, who had excelled in chemistry class. This created a gap in the teacher’s expectations and caused him to say to her one day: “Why are you not as good at this as your brothers?” It hurt her, and when I later heard this story, it diminished my opinion of that teacher. Laurie may have gotten a B in chemistry, but she was a National Merit Scholar; I was not.
As children we were captive passengers on summer family vacations. Despite the natural bickering that occurs when siblings are held in close quarters, the fascination with the rugged landscapes of the mountainous western U.S. kept us in collective awe. We camped and hiked and explored, building a shared experience that we still reflect back on today.
Our connections as siblings continued as we became adults raising families. And when our parents moved to Idaho, we formed a caravan of vehicles, helping to transport their possessions west, but stopping to camp at State and National Parks along the way. It was an amalgam of families, each trying to keep their brood safe and under control. It was nearly impossible of course, which only reminded us of how it must have been for our parents to have managed us.
Laurie encountered challenges in her first marriage and eventually divorced. I recall them, but only at a distance. No one can know the inner workings of a marital relationship. I don’t know if I was able to help her during this time, but I do know that when I encountered marital problems of my own, she was extremely helpful to me. What a reversal of sibling support! The younger being able to counsel the elder.
It was not the only difficulty Laurie encountered. She suffered several others, perhaps related. While her first marriage struggled, her second thrived. Her boys needed guidance; she provided it. Her husband suffered liver failure; she helped him at every step through a complex transplant. She once sought solace in alcohol; she overcame it. When she encountered declines in her health, she found the balance of medications to mitigate them.
She more than once quoted John Lennon to me: “Life is what happens when you are making other plans.” This suggests that she was embracing the chaotic nature of her life, rather than regretting it not running at a slower pace.
Whenever something unplanned came along, she made plans to get past it. She was an optimist. Her Facebook page announces: “Encourage one another and build each other up.” This was Laurie.
She had a smile that always lit up the room, and she had a friendly social breeziness. She had the ability to make friends easily with everyone around her. As my “outlaws” can attest, she was a welcoming sibling-in-law to each of my siblings’ spouses. They saw her go out of her way to include them and help them penetrate the sibling circle. This was Laurie
Laurie was also a strong support for our mother, during her long struggle with COPD. She frequently flew to Idaho Falls to help her, assisting and relieving our brother Eric and wife Rhonda, the front lines living in the same city. This was Laurie.
In her recent years she has enjoyed her continued happy marriage. I am extremely grateful that I met her the day before her scheduled surgery, the precipitating event of her passing. She told me that it gave her great satisfaction to see her boys thriving. She was proud of them. She was pleased to be a grandmother to the son of her eldest, most challenging boy, who had found love, purpose, and family. She was proud of her boys who had become fine men with talents and skills, had built strong relationships, and maintained the sense and appreciation of family, a value for which she so strongly provided an example.
I will miss Laurie. This is a lightning strike for me. A strike that happened while I was making other plans.
I had the fortune of starting my career at a signature moment in the computer revolution—the microprocessor had just been invented and it was rapidly being incorporated into the many various tools that leverage our human intelligence. Among those tools are the instruments we use to measure the world around us.
Up until then, instruments that required some amount of interaction used very direct physical interfaces: knobs, buttons, and dials for input; meters, gauges and chart recorders for output. They were wired in complex arrangements but had limitations in how complex their measurement could be.
The microprocessor changed this by providing an inexpensive logic element that could monitor and manage much more complex channels of interaction: switches, keypads, digital displays, sensors, data terminals, printers, transducers and actuators were now on the list. The opportunities to make better measurements than ever before, or measurements that simply could not be performed previously because of their complexity, now became possible. As a result, there was a renaissance in instrumentation.
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I was recently presented with a gift from a young family member. He thought I would get a kick out of a “NASA Mission Control Computer Chip.” And I did, even more than he could have imagined.
I suspect that an entrepreneur had acquired some decommissioned NASA equipment and found a way to monetize it by stripping the chips out of their sockets, packaging them, providing a backstory, and selling them to nostalgia seekers, space history nerds, and millennials looking for novel gifts for their boomer relatives. This is not a criticism. This is a fine way to keep these components from ending up in a scrap heap headed to a landfill and instead make a final tribute to a remarkable human project.
To someone born after the Apollo moon landing program, the artifacts of those times must seem just that: obsolete artifacts. There are still computer chips, of course, but they are smaller, more complex, and come in highly sophisticated packages that look nothing like those of that era. Just look inside a cell phone.
My pleasure at receiving this gift was not just the experience of once again seeing a 16-pin DIP (“dual inline package”). It was also the recalled memories of designing circuit boards with them in the 1970s. At that time, I worked for a small company that made geophysical instruments. We had employees, mostly women with fine motor skills, who hand-assembled these DIP packages, along with other electronic components onto circuit boards, soldering them into place and wiring the boards into the instrument chassis. I contributed to the design of those boards by figuring out how the digital chips needed to connect to each other.
I was curious what exact chip from mission control I had received. When I looked closely, I could see the part number stamped on its top: MCM 4116 BC20, along with the manufacturer’s logo and date code (8122- the 22nd week of 1981). This part number seemed familiar to me. I looked it up and found it to be a memory chip with 16,384 bits. Now even more memories flooded in! This was a milestone memory chip in its day!
And it was the very chip I had used in one of my first memory board designs. I was quite intimidated because it was in a class of memory called “dynamic,” which was a euphemism for memory that forgets rapidly. In order for it to not forget, it needed to be refreshed. And I had no idea how to do that.
There are now many different technologies used to store data, but in the 1970s, there were only a few, categorized by type. Read-only-memory, ROM, had data permanently etched in place. It was good for storing data that would never change, like program code and conversion tables. The other major memory type was, and is, random access memory, RAM. This is memory that can be written with any data pattern, and accessed later, in any order (randomly) to recover it. There were two types of RAM: static and dynamic. Static memory, SRAM (pronounced “ess-ram”), would retain its data state for as long as it was powered on. Dynamic memory, DRAM (“dee-ram”), as mentioned above, would fade away with time, measured in milliseconds.
Why would anyone bother with memory that didn’t remember much?
Capacity. It was possible to fit much more memory in a DRAM chip than an SRAM chip. This was due to the additional complexity (transistors) needed for the static memory cell to stay, well, static, and hold its value. In contrast, the DRAM cell comprised a single capacitor, a place to store electrons. As a result, DRAM chips had 4X the capacity of SRAM for the same size or cost.
Unfortunately, the electrons on the DRAM capacitors had the tendency to leak away. This can be compensated for by sensing the memory value before it fades, and then re-charging the capacitor to its original state. It is a lot of overhead to visit every memory cell, read it, and re-write it before time runs out, but memory was valuable, and the effort was deemed worth it.
I knew little of these underlying details of memory chips in 1977, but I did know that it was easy to design circuits using SRAM chips. Connect them up, and they seemed to “just work”. On the other hand, on hearing about the onerous demands and complexities of using DRAM, I was scared. It just seemed too complicated, and I didn’t think I knew enough to take it on. It might be really hard. So I resisted this project.
Eventually, I had to face the task. I obtained the data sheets and application notes for the DRAM chip I would be using: the 4116, just like the one recovered from mission control. In the days before the internet, this involved procuring the published data books from the parts vendor. I then dove into learning about dynamic memory and how to manage it.
I learned the basics that I described above, and I also learned that I didn’t have to read and re-write every cell. The chip could help out with that task. Memory was arranged in rows and columns of cells. If I could access each row, the chip would take care of refreshing all the columns in it! Other chips were available to invisibly help with accessing each row.
As I learned how to make the control circuits keep the memory refreshed, I realized that my fear had been unwarranted. This wasn’t so awful. It was not over my head. I knew how to do this!
I would eventually become skilled enough to use DRAM chips in high-end color displays, sometimes devoting many bytes of memory for every pixel, an unheard-of extravagance made possible with the increasing capacity and dropping costs of DRAM.
I took away a lesson from all this. Something may seem incredibly complex, like the ubiquitous example of “rocket science,” but a complex field is not necessarily a difficult field, especially to those who are in its midst and have learned along the way. As one learns a little, the next questions to ask become apparent and guide you to learn more.
As a result of this experience, I became less hesitant about taking on new and unfamiliar challenges. Confront the challenge and the results are better, and you are better.
It has been discouraging to see the social disruption around us, the breakdown of norms, maybe a result of covid, but probably other forces as well. These ebbs and flows of how humans manage themselves are part of a longer-term story. Our individual experiences are part of a much smaller one, usually within a family with children, parents, and grandparents.
Some years ago, my dad sent me an article titled “The Stories That Bind Us.” It was interesting, but I took away only part of the message, which was that those children who had an awareness of their family history, by way of family stories, did better when they were released into the wild, er, I mean, into the world. The ups and downs, the achievements and setbacks, the triumphs and failures of older family members, became part of a narrative that demonstrated the arbitrariness of life events, and the pluck, resolve, and dedication of those family members to overcome such setbacks.
It’s a fascinating article, but I had forgotten some of the recommendations it made. I am always wary of correlations between some behavior and some outcome, say “people who do X, live longer than those who don’t”, where X can be anything, like “read a novel every week” or “be an amateur radio operator”. Somehow, I just don’t buy that if I read more fiction, or took up ham radio as a hobby, I would live longer as a result.
But in this case, there was an assessment tool, twenty questions, and there was a suggestion that family traditions contribute to the resilience we seek for our children. Traditions, even hokey ones, seem to instill a sense of stability and foundation in our kids.
So I was extremely pleased to host a “sausage-making party” shortly after Thanksgiving with Poldi’s and my combined families, this year including grandchildren! The last time we made sausage was seven years ago. Then Covid and other factors interfered.
This is a tradition that goes back many years in my family. My Swedish grandmother would anticipate the upcoming Christmas dinner she prepared every year, and make sure that she had a supply of Swedish sausage at hand. After all, her father would expect it to be on the plate right next to the lutefisk!
So she organized a sausage-making event every year, inviting her children and their families to participate, luring them with a delicious meal when the work was done. The sausage-making work itself required a coordination of tasks: the sausage casings (pig or cow intestines) needed to be rinsed and cleaned of their salt packing; the spices that provided the flavor, however minuscule, had to be measured and blended; the filler ingredients, potatoes, celery, and onions, had to be peeled, sliced, and chopped. And it all had to be blended into a mix of ground meat, usually pork and beef. There was a lot of labor involved in this project.
The climax of the event was when the ground meat, spices, and vegetables, mixed by the hands of grandchildren willing to get them messy, was placed in the sausage press, a large cast-iron cylinder with a giant crank and mechanical gears that drove a piston plate.
At this point, some finesse was involved. The casings were carefully applied and mounted onto the nozzle of the machine. And then the piston was cranked down into the press cylinder to force the meat through the nozzle into the casing. Two people were required for this task. A delicate balance of piston pressure and casing management was needed to make a proper sausage!
Most children don’t particularly care about the intestine casings (which involves touching them), but they all seem to enjoy turning the crank. So it is a frequent scene where the kids are taking turns at the crank, while a few adults are preparing the casings and pulling the sausages as the press squeezes the meat into them.
And this year, as we resumed this tradition, was no different. Kids being squeamish about guts, but curious about meat, is just exactly the thing that might make a mark in their memories.
I look forward to future sausage-making parties and the involvement of my grandchildren. Maybe it will contribute to their sense of family, that we are all part of their team, and give them confidence as they navigate their world. If so, I am happy to provide the hokey tradition that does it.
One of the works that came out of TAT Productions in the 1960s was an educational filmstrip. “Filmstrips” were a popular and common educational resource in the days of ditto machines and library paste. They presented a sequence of images that were explained by the teacher to convey an important topic in the class.
The project was for a history assignment. I don’t remember the exact topic, but I remember being pleased that I had access to a special-purpose camera. The camera club, sponsored by our chemistry teacher, Mr Van Wyk, had equipment available to its members, including a “half-frame” camera. This enabled and inspired us (Terry and Thor, the principals of TAT Productions), to make our own filmstrip. Terry did the heavy lifting, gathering the visual sources that we would include in our filmstrip, and I provided the technical effort of operating the photographic copy stand and the lighting. We had a broad range of materials and worked to present them in a coherent explanatory sequence. I arranged the camera position, lighting, and exposure, to capture each item in its best representation. We both worked on the script to accompany the filmstrip presentation.
When we developed the film and spooled it up to load into the filmstrip projector, we discovered a “production error”. Most of the images had been taken in “portrait” aspect, taller than wide, but the filmstrip projector was designed for frames in “landscape” mode. This resulted in the class having to turn their heads to make sense of it. We soon figured out that someone could turn and hold the projector on its side while advancing the film. And some poor student had to do this whenever our history teacher inflicted our production on his subsequent classes.
TAT productions went on to undertake more projects, forgettable to most, but unforgettable to us, including “The Commercial”, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, and “Images”, all featuring fellow students and our teachers, conveying truly important messages to our classmates of those times.
Today of course, the classroom projector would automatically rotate the pictures to match their aspect. I suspect that somewhere, in the same spirit that created TAT Productions, there is a modern-day collaboration between students making TikTok videos for their history class assignment. They will probably also encounter “production problems”, but it won’t be something as simple as getting the aspect ratio wrong!
The Mission Ends
I would not stay around to see the mission end. Once the instrument was airborne, there was no further purpose for our lab in the airplane hangar, and my job title became moving man and trucker. The packing went ok, but on the way home I ran into another weather condition: severe thunderstorms. Driving the broad-sided truck east on Highway 12, it was a challenge to keep it in my lane. The rain slowed me down but fortunately, the wind was not enough to blow me over. I thought about how fickle the spring weather in the Midwest could be. After weeks of steady wind, the short window of calm that permitted a balloon launch was followed by a gale force blast, perhaps to compensate and bring the average wind speed back up to the South Dakota standard.
Continue readingOur next opportunity finally arrived two weeks later. Having been through two “dress rehearsals,” we knew what to expect.
The procedure was to lay out the balloon on a protective tarp on the runway. The topmost section of the balloon, a small portion that would become the “bubble”, was fed through a retaining “spool” and folded back on itself. The top section had two tubes, made of balloon material, through which helium would be fed, inflating the bubble, which would gradually ease up from the tarp, eventually becoming large enough to lift itself off the ground entirely, with only the spool and the tension from the uninflated remainder keeping it in place.
Continue readingOff Duty
While the wind blew, the various research groups and the launch crew prepared and tested their experiments and rigs, like fishermen mending nets to get ready for the next big catch. At the end of each day we would check the wind conditions and then give up for the day, leaving the airport to seek dinner and retire to our rooms at the Super-8 for a few hours of personal time and sleep before repeating the routine the next day.
Continue readingInstrument Troubleshooting
Cosmic ray instruments are complex and it seems there is always something that needs adjusting or fixing or calibrating, and then testing and confirming and re-calibrating. This is what consumed our time while waiting for the wind to die down. And it is a good thing to have had that time to do those last ground tests, because we encountered a troubling condition—an intermittent false trigger.
Continue readingSetting up Shop
Scientific balloon launches have been part of NASA’s mission for over 30 years, but in 1977, they were conducted by NCAR– the National Center for Atmospheric Research. NCAR maintained a balloon launching facility in Texas that had all of the equipment and resources to support experiments like ours. Unfortunately, Texas was too far south for our experiment. Instead, we would be operating from makeshift facilities in Aberdeen, a town of 25,000 in an area of South Dakota that offered low population, but enough infrastructure to meet our technical and launch requirements.
There was a regional airport outside of town, and an airplane hangar was provided to house our laboratory field station. We were not the only researchers, however. Groups from other universities were also trying to measure the properties of cosmic rays. We each had a section of the hangar to set up and prepare our experiments for launch. After packing up our instrument and all the essential support equipment from our 4th-floor lab in the Physics building into a rental truck and driving a day west on Highway 12, we arrived in Aberdeen. It took us several more days to recreate an operational cosmic ray field lab in the airplane hangar.
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